By Angie Fike
Hotchkiss, Colorado
When it’s the kind of hot that is muggy and still, the goats rest, lying low in the dust and hay. They amble out to the fields for the occasional forage, often staying in the speckled shade of the willow trees that line our driveway. They doze with their heads on each other, the small ones curled against the bigger. When I go to close the chickens inside their coop at night, the onlooking goats shift and stretch. They follow my light with their wide eyes.
This season, I experienced my first goat death and goat birth. After Old Side Chicken, one of our goats, died in April, we bottle fed her newborns every few hours, warming the milk and making sure they drank it. Eventually, we helped them latch on to Pat, one of our milking goats who hadn’t had a baby this season. We held the little squirming babies — whose cries sound uncannily human — and gradually Pat relinquished her big, patient body to care for them. They now move as a unit.
We added twelve newborns to the herd this season. A lot of goats. So we gave a few of them to a roaming herd that eats invasive and wildfire-prone dry brush in the Western Slope. Their moms cried as we separated them into the traveling livestock truck. I felt a pang; tears came hot and fast. I told Mark I was too soft, too sensitive for this work. He told me, “You’re supposed to feel sad. That’s a good thing. It’s how we keep our empathy.”
Farming — and all the dynamic, daily challenges it brings — offers me the chance to stay attuned to so many lessons. There are so many beings around me offering different examples of how to react, how to bear witness, how to move, and how to lie still. Our livestock guardian dog, Gherkin, is whining at the neighbor’s chainsaw right now. The ducks rejoice at a rushing leak in the irrigation. They skate through the mud and flap with glee. The guinea fowl sounds the alarm when Spud, the pup, moves too erratically, bounds too bouncily toward the chicken coop.
This morning, I walked out to check the firmness of our purple cabbage, the blossoms on the lemon cucumber plants, and the water in the barn cats’ bowl. I wake up as I move, blinking in the brightness, and feel again and again that I know this land, but must re-learn it every single day. It is a knowing that must be practiced. It is constantly shifting, moving, humbling me.
This afternoon, Ricardo and his friend are hoeing the potato fields. Just an hour of this will cramp up my back for days. It is hot and they are covered in layers, sweatshirts draped over their heads and necks to block out the sun.
I weed the dill and lay new irrigation with Dustin. We are all working to keep the farm going — it feels like a strained, often senseless, smelly, beautiful, beloved feat. I pour myself another cup of coffee and go check the goats’ water.